"If you remember the sixties," quipped Robin Williams (and quite a few others), "you weren"t there." He was, of course, referring to the haze created by all those mind-expanding drugs the beautiful people popped, mainlined and smoked. In truth, however, time has proved an equally effective hallucinogen. As years go by, real events have given way to wild imagination. The decade has been transformed into a morality play, an explanation of how the world went astray or, conversely, how hope was squandered. Problems of the present are blamed on myths of the past.

Memory acts like a filter, yielding a clearer image of the past. The impurities are removed, producing a distillation both logical and meaningful. We forget, for instance, that back then the music business made a lot of money from silly songs like "Yummy, Yummy, Yummy," or that Sergeant Barry Sadler"s "Ballad of the Green Berets" outsold "Give Peace a Chance." We remember the Students for a Democratic Society, but forget the Young Americans for Freedom. We recall Che Guevara's success in Cuba bu